Around The World In 80 Days (PG)

Sensible, mild-mannered marmoset Passepartout dreams of travelling the world. By chance, he crosses paths with greedy frog Phileas, who accepts a wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. If Phileas succeeds, he will be rewarded with 10 million delicious clams. Passepartout joins Phileas on his exhilarating escapade, encountering wondrous characters along the way as they race against the clock to complete their expedition.

LondonNet Film Review
Around The World In 80 Days (PG)

Oscar-nominated French director and animator Samuel Tourneux unleashes a menagerie of anthropomorphic critters in a pedestrian, family-friendly adaptation of Jules Verne’s 19th-century adventure novel. Set on a large island with visually contrasting ecosystems including a desertscape and lush jungle, which creature characters mistakenly believe constitutes the entire world, this effervescent caper retains key figures from the book including Phileas, Passepartout and Detective Fix and adheres fairly to the timeframe, tracked via on-screen captioning. Despite the titular deadline and a sizeable wager resting on its successful completion, Tourneux’s picture lacks any sense of urgency or peril and could easily be rechristened Around The Houses For 82 Minutes…

Screenwriters Gerry Swallow and David Michel draw attention to deficiencies in their writing by allowing animated characters to poke fun at lazy adherences to convention or second-hand flourishes like a full-cast dance-along to Technotronic’s 1989 anthem Pump Up The Jam that clearly hopes to emulate the lemurs from Madagascar shaking their tails to I Like To Move It. Self-referential jibes aside, the script plays hide and seek with jokes and neglects to find them while vocal performances possess the same frenetic energy as action sequences, which expand the running time but serve little narrative purpose.

Mild-mannered marmoset Passepartout (voiced by Cory Doran) dreams of travelling the world like his adventurer hero, Juan Frog de Leon (Juan Chioran), who famously circumnavigated the globe in 90 days. Alas, Passepartout will never leave his painfully quiet coastal home or the smothering kisses of an overprotective mother (Shoshana Sperling), whose mantra for life is, “Do nothing until you’re fully prepared”. Instead, the parent-pecked primate suffers bullying at the hands of snide shrimp Herman (Brandon McGibbon), who runs a daily sweepstake on how long it will take him to make the “weird monkey kid” cry.

One of these intimidatory exchanges is interrupted by the splashy arrival of con artist frog Phileas (Rob Tinkler), who surfs into town and bets Herman that he can beat Juan Frog de Leon’s globe-trotting record by 10 days. If Phileas brings back “shelfie evidence” of exotic far away locales using a clam-era, he will be rewarded with 10 million delicious shellfish. Passepartout defies his mother to join Phileas on this exhilarating escapade and the distraught matriarch implores gerbil police officer Fix (Heather Bambrick) to give chase.

Around The World In 80 Days completes its odyssey by land, sea and air, introducing supporting characters like spunky aviator frog Aouda (Katie Griffin) to facilitate Phileas and Passepartout’s grand endeavour. Animation is brightly coloured and willingly sacrifices realism. When one hysterical character cries, single torrents erupt from each eye like burst water pipes and instantaneously turn off on cue. Sperling scene-steals vocally as a meddlesome matriarch and almost makes us wish that Passepartout never leaves home.

– Kim Hu